Chương 3: Lost in the Fog

A run-down attic. Whoever owned the place had swept every inch of it with real patience, and everything sat exactly where it belonged. Even so, you could tell nobody had lived here in a long time. When his feet came down on the floor, the old boards groaned like they resented being asked. There was a cup of water on the nightstand. He looked down. Clean white bandages wound around his chest. His right arm was splinted, casted, and slung against his ribs.

He pushed the equally old wooden door open with his left hand, and something faintly sour drifted past his nose. Coming down the attic stairs one step at a time, Kaelvorn felt that gravity again, the kind that settled him. This was Earth. Not the one he knew, and honestly it might be more dangerous than Viltrum in the middle of a civil war. But it was Earth. No cold instructor, no screaming one, forcing him to beat a kid he'd eaten breakfast with to death.

No required curriculum where you hit every single training benchmark and got thrown into a cage with some hideous alien beast anyway, just to see who came out. And nobody was going to order his squad to wipe out a few billion lives because that particular civilization refused to stop resisting. If he'd been born Viltrumite, fine. Clean paper, ink goes wherever you spill it, and at the end you've got one more functioning Viltrumite warrior. Except he wasn't. He was from Earth.

Two completely different minds carved up the space behind his eyes and refused to share it. The survival math he'd worked out at five years old had never once managed to erase twenty-something years of an ordinary, quiet life. The nightmare came back on a loop. Viltrum sending him to conquer the Earth he'd come from. And him, so deep in terror and rage that he couldn't stop, crushing the people closest to him with his own hands. The memory flickered through and went out.

Kaelvorn lifted his good arm and pinched the space between his eyebrows. The ground floor wasn't empty. Past a worn sofa and an old boxy television, a row of very basic farm tools stood against the wall. A few hoes, an iron rake, a sickle hanging on the wood paneling, and a straw hat. His eyes stopped on the straw hat. His mind had been most of the way gone before he blacked out, but he knew what he'd seen.

"With that guy walking around, there's no way Viltrum's database rates Earth as a vacation spot." Kaelvorn felt his whole body go numb. He'd spent the entire trip frozen so his wounds wouldn't rot, and after waking up he hadn't gotten around to checking the pod's flight log. Second transmigration? Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Or was this some kind of blended American comics world?

He'd been in such a rush to write down Earth's coordinates that he'd never checked Viltrum's database for whether this universe had a planet called Krypton. Theoretically, no. If this universe contained a species that turned into a legitimate threat to Viltrumites under a yellow sun, the instructors would have said something. At least a few sentences, back when they were lecturing a room full of kids.

Every species capable of threatening a Viltrumite warrior was mandatory material in the only cultural studies class Viltrum bothered to run. They covered civilizations that weren't even in Viltrum's league. Krypton would have gotten a chapter. Kaelvorn looked around the little house, taking in all of it at once, and started working through his situation. He hadn't been taken prisoner. Whoever brought him here had probably filed him as some alien refugee. So why was the housing this bare?

His ears caught waves somewhere close. He followed the sound to the window, and through the glass there was sunlight and open ocean going out forever. Even for an alien refugee. If not the Fortress of Solitude up in the Arctic, then the Hall of Justice, or the Watchtower. Somewhere you could keep eyes on him. Waves kept breaking against the rocks in overlapping runs, mixed with the small sound of wind slipping through the window frame, and it gave the quiet house something like a pulse.

Kaelvorn leaned against the window, fingertips on the cool glass, watching the line where the water met the sky. He needed the date, the location, and the identity of the man with the S on his chest. Fast. A Viltrumite body healed considerably faster than a human one. The wounds weren't closed, but moving around was no longer a problem. He flexed his good leg, feeling the low ache running through the muscle, then used the wall to walk himself slowly to the middle of the room.

Next to the old television sat a wooden cabinet with the paint coming off it, and a small brass lock hanging on the door. Kaelvorn gave it a gentle pull with his left hand. The lock snapped. Even wrecked, a Viltrumite body put out more force than anyone on Earth was ready to imagine. Inside the cabinet, a few old clothes were folded in a neat stack, and under them was a yellowed journal. He picked it up, ran his fingers over the rough paper, and opened to the first page. The handwriting was a little clumsy.

All of it small daily stuff.

"Rough surf at the beach today. Net tore again, have to patch it tomorrow."

"Mrs. Simmons next door brought over a bowl of seafood soup. It was good."

"Radio says strange things are happening in the city. People who can fly. Hope it stays away from the coast." Kaelvorn flipped through it fast, and the further he got, the heavier he felt. The journal covered six months. The last entry was three days ago: "Found a hurt seabird today. Hope it gets better soon." Not one word about superheroes or aliens. The only thing even close was that line about people who could fly. Kaelvorn found himself completely lost. An S-shaped emblem. The ability to fly in deep space.

And a bio-force field, which he was fairly sure he'd heard through the fog before he went under. So it wasn't Superman who saved him? Then his ears picked up something faint. He put the journal back where he found it and, without thinking about it, kicked the broken lock under the sofa. A second later the attic door swung gently inward, and a middle-aged man in blue work coveralls stepped inside. He was tall, his skin a little rough, his face lined by years of sea wind.

Seeing Kaelvorn standing in the middle of the room, something startled crossed his eyes, then softened into an easy smile.

"You're awake?" His voice was low and worn down.

"How do you feel?" Kaelvorn went tight all over. His left hand quietly closed into a fist, and what power he had left began gathering fast. He didn't say anything. He just watched the man, checking his expression and his movements for hostility. The man seemed to notice, because he stopped where he was and raised both hands.

"Easy. I'm not going to hurt you."

"Superman brought you here. He said you were hurt badly and needed somewhere quiet to recover." Kaelvorn stayed tense. Hearing the word Superman loosened something in his chest, but until he had this world figured out, the act stayed on. As an alien himself, relatively speaking, he knew roughly how this went. If this really was Superman's world, then on a decent number of planets out there, the man had a reputation that bordered on absurd.

Which only made Kaelvorn look harder at what kind of world he'd actually landed in. Because in all those years on Viltrum, he had never once heard that this universe's Earth had a Superman. So which universe am I standing in?